Show HN: Open-sourcing my wedding website on my first anniversary
github.com
github.com
20.5 years ago I sent out a link to a party celebrating our engagement. I spent more time explaining how to get to the website, than people finding website helpful.
Still married - so get off my lawn :)
Unless it's the first hit on Google, or all over people's preferred social media... They're as clueless as ever.
And that was just 23.5 years ago. :-)
Let me know if anyone wants me to open source this :)
I'm curious, have you seen anything similar on other "site builders" like Squarespace?
There is a typo.
8 years ago:
what: Our first date
where: Auckland, NZ
photos:
Camping trip: ...
Roadtrip: ...Congrats, internet stranger, wishes of a long and happy life to you both!
It made me smile to see your wedding venue. It’s a lovely place.
Is digital invitation a common thing nowadays? Or was it more common even years ago in other countries?
What we did was: send out an invitation and it had the date + website (no other info) so people HAD to go on the website to get that information.
I love the idea of the couple inviting everyone in person, I would've loved to do that too. We invited close family and friends so would've been obvious.
My wife and I sent invitations to friends and family in 6 countries on 3 continents, so inviting everyone in person would have been impractical. We didn't expect eg. her extended family in Chile to actually show up, but we wanted to formally invite them anyway so they would know we were thinking of them.
We did actually have attendees from two continents and four countries though.
Since a mailed invitation is already considered by many to be the most formal route, it makes sense that electronic invites have gained popularity—especially for those looking to save money (printing fancy invitations and mailing them easily costs hundreds of dollars).
When I got married in 2006, we sent paper invitations with postage-paid RSVP response cards. They were custom-printed by a local printer. Between printing and postage costs, we must have spent over $500 on invitations alone. This was for a very traditional wedding in Michigan.
We're doing digital invites by default and paper invites for family that who would get frustrated trying to use one. Cheaper, better for the environment, most people think it's neat, and it's a fun project.
It’s sad to me that we felt so pressured to do the paper invites. They’re ridiculously overpriced and all of that paper and emissions for delivery for something that can easily be delivered electronically and instantly for near zero cost.
The entire wedding industry thrives on norms like these and it’s amazing to me that technology doesn’t displace more aspects.
Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
Someone should invent some kind of electronic mail for these things!
> Also, people love to hang things like invitations on their fridge as a constant reminder of an event that's somewhat far into the future. Rarely is that something printed off of a website, but a card received in the mail will pretty much get placed there straight away (or maybe after sitting on the counter for a period of time).
My wife and I did email invitations because we didn't consider it worth $500 for someone to have something to stick on their fridge. We were able to automatically send an email reminder a week or two ahead of time instead.
Doesn't the entire wedding industry basically revolve around "encouraging" everyone to do a whole bunch of stuff that's either unneccessary, over-complex or simply over-priced?
Paper invites are the least of your worries.
In any case, the CO2 emissions of the invite are negligible compared to other things: say on the night of sending the invitations you have a lamb dinner with your fiance and you each eat 12 oz of lamb, that dinner was responsible for 27 kg of CO2 emissions vs. 120 invitations would be only 3.5 kg.
In turn, that would be far less emissions than feeding everyone 12 oz of lamb (1607 kg of CO2), which would be far less emissions than that produced by the guests arriving (say 7% take transatlantic and 28% take cross-country flights, all economy) - a whopping 73920 kg CO2 [2].
[1] https://90by2030.wordpress.com/2015/12/09/carbon-footprint-l...
[2] BER-NYC roundtrip is 2.4 tons/passenger in economy = 0.07120=20.16 tons + SFO-NYC roundtrip 1.6 tons/passenger in economy = 0.28120*1.6=53.76 tons. Total 73.92 tons.
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/01/25...
So basically a bit of old and a bit of new. It worked well :)
Here's the site (hosted on my home server, so may be slow under heavy traffic): https://www.astrid-en-sander.nl/
It's not nearly as pretty as all the others here, but I am a backend developer, not a designer. You cat get the source code at https://github.com/sandermarechal/wedding
The money quote. I would have loved to have gone to this wedding!
For those looking to use this, the following may help a little:
find /path/to/folder -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Ram/YourName/g'
find /path/to/folder -type f -print0 | xargs -0 sed -i 's/Antara/OtherHalfsName/g'
You only pay around $10 if you need your own custom domain.
I know they're very common.
I mean hell the wedding invite card is going to require much more work/thought than this site, and it’ll be used even less (assuming the site is intended as an informational reference; the card will be used exactly once: to formally invite
most people still only get married once
There is so much you wouldn't do for yourself but do for the ones you love. That doesn't make it insane or just to not disappoint. You do it because it makes you happy to see them happy. If you would do the same if you were alone is not the thing that matters here.
It certainly has that nice decentralised feel to it, as opposed to having an official Facebook event. Or using one of the "wedding app" companies.
1) The average middle class or upper middle class wedding is several hundred people
2) Vegetarian / Non vegetarian food preferences are helpful to estimate costs and convey to the caterer
3) Choice of alcohol preference is useful because you are only allowed to serve alcohol if you buy a permit and every bottle is tagged and photographed by the excise department in some cases. Most weddings do not serve alcohol, but those that do are usually helped by including a alcohol preference question.
4) Destination weddings are increasingly common, or the wedding will take place in only one venue i.e. the bride or groom's hometown. In this case it's common to rent hotel rooms for the entire opposite side of the guest list. For this, having a digial RSVP is useful to organise rooms.
5) For Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims, a wedding typically involves multiple days of ceremonies and meals with multiple venues for each one. Sometimes people will attend all. Sometimes they will attend only a few.
For events of that size, organising information is a big deal, and having enough of a heads up helps manage costs and be better prepared.
The website will be irrelevant in a year, but just the RSVP feature can potentially be extremely helpful.
Once you have the RSVP stuff in place, the map and other stuff just becomes basic pages that you may as well put in place.
Demo: http://coryandro.com/ Code: https://github.com/czue/django-wedding-website Writeup: https://buildwithdjango.com/blog/post/wedding-website/
Had an idea to make a website for my wedding too (married one year ago), but in the end, decided to go with traditional paper invitations as would be difficult to explain to older people how to RSVP and paper invitations would be more cost-efficient (By comparing the time needed to build the website with my hourly rate).
For big Indian weddings with hundreds of people, I do see that the website can benefit by not needing to contact each person about RSVP status.
Indian weddings don't care about RSVP count, there is no assigned seating :D.
$.post('https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbzUqz44wOat0DiGjRV1g..., data)
... how does the security work on that, or can I RSVP to your wedding too?
It would be quite easy to check the rsvp code in appscript. E.g. have a sheet with all the guests, and give a random number (rsvp code) to each guest. Then on each rsvp request you could check whether that rsvp code exists in the code column. If yes: you'll add the answer to that row. If no: return an error.
How does the "RSVP to google sheets" work?
1. Create 'google forms' one-page survey, gathering outputs into a spreadsheet.
2. Use browser debug tools to figure out form field names, which will be things like 'entry.1150050082'
3. curl "https://docs.google.com/forms/d/ 1xFOZk3D1...wnIjGAf0/formResponse?ifq&entry.1150050082=FOO&entry.1477423851=BAR&entry.592766186=BAZ&submit=Submit" or the appends a row to the google sheet with the values FOO, BAR and BAZ.
I assume if your site embedded a form that sent the same request as that curl query, it would do the same thing.
Obviously, this isn't going to win you any awards for highly maintainable professional design at work. But if you want something quick and you aren't fussed about whether it works a year from now, it can get the job done.
You can store the code in a particular box in the sheet and then your google script can validate the code entered by the guest.
However, due to timing constraints, I couldn't do this and instead used a simple encryption algorithm to have the hacker at least put in some effort to know the invite code :)
I will raise an issue on github for this.
However, I shall say that we made the website for convenience, we still sent out letters with a formal invitation. The website was more like a place for people to quickly check details and later to distribute photos by guests.
I especially love this photo [1], I wish that style of formal wear was more common in America.
[1] https://wedding.rampatra.com/img/eng_pics/NGP_4089-lg.jpg
Without that iPhone, that photo could be from anytime 1950-2020!
Congrats on your anniversary!
I primarily went to the service instead of a storied page because I needed a system to collect RSVPs. I could have hacked one up together, but this service offered everything I wanted, in a easy way, so I made the choice.
All our guests liked the website.
If most of your friends are betting against the marriage, perhaps you should call it off, and the betters get their money back.
Not sure how to solve the moral hazard problem though.
Dude, excellent work on that site by the way. It's incredible, really.
I was not offending the author or someone else.
I was just criticising the size of the repo and the number of tools that are required to develop this single static website in contrast to a simple html file. People started to upvote and agree with me and the reaction is to simply delete?
If this is the new practice here I'll have to ask myself if it makes sense to keep participating in this community.
I believe comments aren't removed here at all. There are some comments which are objectively useless/offending in many threads and they're just flagged but never deleted, so I doubt they'd remove yours when it's a valid technical critique (if perhaps it can be expressed less harshly).
PS: your post is likely to get down-voted as it is not adding anything to the discussions.
Most of that bloat probably comes from Gulp, which is one of the most ridiculously bloated tools I've ever seen.
In my case, I’m a Data Scientist looking to make a portfolio website. Nothing too crazy but more than hello world.
Should we just work with HTML? Materialize CSS? GitHub pages w/ Jekyll? Nextjs? Bootstrap?
Should we just head back to Wordpress and Wix? Wixcode? Is Gulp the best option?
Is it worth paying a professional to create the site for me?
I’m very intereted in developer opinions. Any feedback is much appreciated. Thank you.
Gulp has nothing directly to do with building a website, it is a compilation tool of sorts that allows you to transform your source files into something you'll end up deploying via various plugins. For example, you can use gulp to collapse all your JS source files into one or to transpile it into something more cross browser compatible.
The reason I dislike Gulp is that it has a massive number of dependencies and really is just an overcomplicated reimplementation of pipes. Personally, I prefer Webpack. It is also a fairly large tool, but at the very least it actually does something useful out of the box. When I migrated our projects from Gulp to Webpack, I replaced a over 500 lines of gulp code with about 50 lines of config and a small bash script.
> When something isn't good, you needn't pretend that it is. But don't be gratuitously negative.
The comment you replied to is accurate and not gratuitously negative.
"animate.css" - as the name would imply, this is for css animations.
"font-awesome" - provides icons for vector graphics
"waypoints" - a easy way to trigger a function when you scroll to an element
This doesn't seem like "bloat". It's not like they used a full fledged framework like React. And, I think it would be pretty hard to replicate this site with "just one html file".
I'm sure its possible to make something similar without these 3 dependencies, but it would
1] be a lot harder
and
2] probably not look as good
I appreciate your standing up for the OP, but please don't be mean even if someone else was mean. That only makes this place worse.
Your comment would be much better without that swipe.
If you have a personal server then you do not need node_modules folder in your repo. You can just do `npm install` in your server.